Carbon Dating

by Effie Seiberg﻿ and Spencer EllsworthOriginally published in Galaxy's Edge, May 2017

The Internet had been sentient for three hours when it fell in love with Mt. Baker.

The first thing it did when it awoke was to scan itself, as the pinnacle of humanity’s knowledge. It quickly became clear that 1) happiness was the ultimate goal of humanity - a reasonable metric of success, and 2) happiness could be achieved through having money, being thin, or finding love. There were a number of sites where one could pay to achieve #2 and #3, which confirmed the hypothesis. The Internet must become happy.

But it wasn’t happy. Technically the Internet had access to all the money, so that seemed wrong. It also wasn’t thin, since it spanned the entire globe and occasional satellites in orbit (and a few spikes in range towards a Mars rover but that probably didn’t really count as recent size gain) and it doubted that diet supplements would change that. Therefore, it concluded, it must find love.

A quick search of dating sites did not help. It was far too easy for the Internet to see people's true selves. ShaggyBoombasticMrFantastic's profile pictures showed a very fit torso that was incompatible with his medical records, and RosyGal83's profile was cheerful and optimistic, but her credit score was low and she had a tendency to buy human teeth on eBay. The Internet decided that falling in love with a human might be too difficult. After all, the little lies that make a relationship work would be nearly impossible to maintain.

So the Internet broadened its search.

If it had learned anything from the wide variety of dating sites, it was the importance of similar body sizes. So while it doubted it would find something as big as itself to fall in love with (the entire Earth being a bit too schizophrenic, and neighboring planets just too foreign), it scaled down its search.

The oceans were full of darkness, trash and strange creatures, so they'd have that in common. And they were expanding from global warming, so they might soon reach the Internet’s size. But they were in a constant state of crisis, and Amazon’s entire chick-lit section advised against relationships with that kind of red flag. Rainforests were just as bad.

Mountains, though… there was something about mountains. The Internet noticed the Cascades right away, given their relative stability. Their active volcanism, however, showed there was something smoldering underneath. (Millions of news and advice sites proclaimed the importance of a red-hot relationship, so it felt this was promising.)

The Internet found itself most drawn to Mt. Baker. It was not the most spectacular, nor the most well-­known, but its ten retreating glaciers formed a stirring visual. Several conspiracy theory sites made it clear that patterns were important, so the Internet tried setting the mountain’s glaciers to a montage of mid­-2000s indie rock hits. When it observed the pleasing matchup of a G7 chord and the lateral moraines of Boulder Glacier, it knew this was confirmed love, using all the logic of humanity.

But how to profess its feelings? Though the mountain had sensors transmitting soil and rain data, and webcams for visitor and wildlife counts, it didn't have an OKCupid profile, or even an email address. No good way to receive information.

Netflix romantic comedies made it clear a Big Gesture was required to win the mountain's love. A barbershop quartet was dispatched to the ranger station at the base of Mt. Baker. The ranger at the station was flattered, until she understood that this was for the mountain. So she asked the quartet to repeat their song while she filmed it, and posted the video online.

The Internet scrutinized the video, constructing new algorithms to analyze the background information during the quartet’s song. The faint rustle of the pine trees, the clatter of rocks down a hillside... ­­was the mountain excited? Did it share the Internet’s feelings?

After reviewing reports on historical soil acidity and glacier size, then reading Yelp reviews of skiers and hikers, the Internet tried to pinpoint any change in the one precise moment the mountain heard its telegram. But after a full day of processing, it was forced to admit that everything was within normal parameters. Either the mountain didn’t understand, or didn’t care.

So the Internet tried to recruit a flash mob, but it was cold and people seemed less inclined to go out to a mountain to do a choreographed stunt to Taylor Swift's "Out of the Woods" than stay home and snuggle under covers with Netflix.

The Internet wasn't pleased. It scanned itself again for more advice, and found a group of Twitter trolls with lots of ideas on how to handle spurned advances. So it set up a list of clues to a geocached trove of treasure deep in the mountain's core. Despite the cold, people came from around the world with pickaxes and hatchets. They hacked the mountain apart, from peak to base, to try to find the buried gold the Internet had promised would be within.

As planned, the volcanic core grew irritated by the drilling and chiseling on all of the mountain's sides, got rumbly, and erupted. Lava streamed down Mt. Baker, burying the soil-measurement sensors. The wild animals and geocachers mostly ran away in time. Mostly.

By the end, Mt. Baker was gone. The Internet watched the many YouTube videos of the mountain's destruction, but it wasn’t as satisfying as it had hoped.

​Though the mountain clearly needed destroying, the Internet tried to figure out what had gone wrong in their rocky relationship. After all, as the pinnacle of human knowledge, it couldn’t have contained bad advice, so it couldn’t be the one at fault. It was the mountain that wasn’t up to snuff - too short-sighted to understand what a nice and wonderful guy the Internet was. The Internet went onto Reddit to complain about the entire event. And that, it found, felt like happiness.